For the Whippersnappers of 2010

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A note from one of us older folks (a friend, not me) to you young whippersnappers:


• I never saw anyone having sex until I was in college (when I saw a porno, on VHS, for the first time).

• I saw people having sex in person, as the local river/beach was mostly a nude beach, and sometimes people would just fuck. This was next to a park with a playground in a suburban area, though you'd have to go over a levee to get to the beach.

• If you wanted to see a movie, you went to a theater. If it left the theater, tough shit. Star Wars came out in 1977. It first aired on pay-per-view (if you had that, nobody I knew did) was in 1982, five years later. It also came out on VHS that same year, if you were lucky enough to have a VHS deck. It wasn't on broadcast TV until 1984, seven years later. But for 5 years after I first saw it, I couldn't see Star Wars again.

• As for VHS decks, they were top-loading, had analog knob tuners, and might cost $700 in 1980. Adjusted for inflation, that's $1,858 today.

• I didn't see MTV until 1987, when the town I was in finally got cable.

• If you went to a bar or a club, you would be a walking ashtray, and all your clothes would need washing. I couldn't go to sleep without showering and washing the smoke and ash out of my hair, or else I'd wake up with a wicked sore throat.

• People lined up at banks on Fridays, to deposit their paychecks and withdraw cash for the weekend. If you ran out of cash over the weekend, too bad.

• When credit cards became available, it was usually only men with very solid credit who could get them. Often single women, even successful businesswomen, couldn't get one. If they were married, they might get them through their husband, with their husband's name was on the card. There were exceptions of course, but I remember reading a Newsweek article around 1980 about how this was starting to change. By the time I got to college, they were giving away credit cards to anyone with a pulse.

• No cell phone, pagers, texting, voicemail, or answering machines. If you wanted to meet up with someone, you had to call them until they were home and picked up, and then make plans. If you ended up at a party, that was usually it. No "hey I'm over at this address, swing by" or anything like that.

• No Facebook or email. Long distance calling was expensive. When I left for college, I wouldn't hear from friends for months, unless one of us bothered to write a letter and mail it. You would just lose track of people.

• Sundays were the days to call family and friends, because rates were cheaper.

• If you went to study abroad, or if you joined the Peace Corps, you were really isolated from friends and family, pre-Internet. You might send or receive letters on very thin airmail paper, but imagine 2 years not speaking to, or seeing your friends and family, except for an occasional snapshot.

• If you ran out of film, no more pictures. You would be very selective about what to take a picture of.

• There is no film or video of me (or most of my friends) throughout our childhoods. Super-8 had died off, and VHS wasn't yet available. I have no idea what I acted or sounded like, or how poorly I played soccer.

• You had to book all travel through a travel agent (or call the airline, but go to the airport to get the ticket).

• You could buy a plane ticket with cash and just walk onto the plane.

• I know people who, as adults, were not allowed to board an airplane because they were not well-dressed. People often wore suits on planes. (One friend was flying across the country to buy a car and drive it back, and was dressed in sweatpants. He had to go home and change, and take a later flight.)

• If you wanted to know something, there was no Google or Wikipedia. You might be able to find out a basic fact if you had a set of encyclopedias. But most information, from important stuff to basic trivia ("who was in that movie?") was not available unless you had a reference book or went to the library and really searched.

• If you needed a newspaper article, you went to the library, searched through card catalogs, then took microfiche and scrolled through hundreds and hundreds of pages, and maybe found what you were looking for. Then you copied it down by hand or, if you were lucky, paid 5¢ per page for a copy.

• Most towns had at least two newspapers, and at least one of them was probably pretty good. They were delivered by kids like me on bicycles.

• Milk was delivered to your door.

• We played outside (there was nothing to do inside anyway).

• Our favorite "toys" were sticks and dirt clods.

• We never wore sunscreen. Or bicycle helmets.

• Cars broke down all the time.

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